Literary Fiction

  • Ghost Wall

    Ghost Wall

    10.50

    It is high summer in rural Northumberland.

    Seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents have joined an encampment run by an archaeology professor with an interest in the region’s dark history of ritual sacrifice. As Silvie finds a glimpse of new freedoms with the professor’s students, her relationship with her overbearing father begins to deteriorate, until the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present.

    I have never read a novel this slender that holds inside it quite so much. Wild, calm, dark yet hopeful… This book ratcheted the breath out of me so skilfully that as soon as I’d finished, the only thing I wanted was to read it again‘ Jessie Burton

  • NORWEGIAN WOOD

    NORWEGIAN WOOD

    12.50

    Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar.

    When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

    This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it’s also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows‘ Independent on Sunday

  • SOUND AND THE FURY

    SOUND AND THE FURY

    12.50

    A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with an introduction by Richard Hughes. Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness – ‘Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?’

  • The Many

    The Many

    8.95

    Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016

    Timothy Buchannan buys an abandoned house on the edge of an isolated village on the coast, sight unseen. When he sees the state of it he questions the wisdom of his move, but starts to renovate the house for his wife, Lauren to join him there. When the villagers see smoke rising from the chimney of the neglected house they are disturbed and intrigued by the presence of the incomer, intrigue that begins to verge on obsession.

    And the longer Timothy stays, the more deeply he becomes entangled in the unsettling experience of life in the small village. Ethan, a fisherman, is particularly perturbed by Timothy’s arrival, but accedes to Timothy’s request to take him out to sea. They set out along the polluted coastline, hauling in weird fish from the contaminated sea, catches that are bought in whole and removed from the village.

    Timothy starts to ask questions about the previous resident of his house, Perran, questions to which he receives only oblique answers and increasing hostility. As Timothy forges on despite the villagers’ animosity and the code of silence around Perran, he starts to question what has brought him to this place and is forced to confront a painful truth. The Many is an unsettling tale that explores the impact of loss and the devastation that hits when the foundations on which we rely are swept away.

  • The Thing Around Your Neck

    The Thing Around Your Neck

    10.95

    ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI

  • UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

    UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

    12.50

    A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.

    A masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest writers, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.